Volume 31, Number 4 (Fall) 1996
Bartfeld, Judi, and Irwin Garfinkel. 1996. "The Impact of Percentage-Expressed Child Support Order on Payment." Journal of Human Resources 31(4):794-815.
We examine the impacts on child support payments of explicitly indexing orders to noncustodial parents’ incomes by expressing orders as a percentage of income rather than as a fixed sum. Using data collected from 21 counties in Wisconsin, we find that payments on behalf of percentage-expressed orders increase much faster than would be expected were orders expressed as a fixed sum, after con t rolling for differences between cases with the two award types. Collections on behalf of percentage-expressed orders increase relative to fixed-sum orders because of large increases over time in the amount of the obligation; in comparison, fixed-sum obligations are extremely stable.
Judi Bartfeld is a graduate student of social work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Irwin Garfinkel is a professor of social work at Columbia University and an affiliate of the Institute for Research on Poverty, University of Wisconsin-Madison. The Institute for Research on Poverty provided support for this research; data were gathered through a contract with the Wisconsin Department of Health and Social Services. Opinions expressed are the authors’ and not necessarily those of the sponsoring institutions. The authors would like to thank Dan Meyer for assistance with this analysis. The data used in this article can be obtained beginning in February 1997 through January 2000 from the authors at the Institute for Research on Poverty, 3412 Social Science Building, University of Wisconsin-Madison, Madison, WI 53706.
© 2002 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System
US ISSN 0022-166X